Making video video games may be very arduous. It could actually take years of labor to ship even a small sport. One side that may take up a very giant period of time and sources is constructing a customized engine, which is why many devs make the most of Unreal, Unity, or one other pre-existing engine to assist pace up improvement. That’s quite common, however not too long ago a very wild instance from the PlayStation 2 days got here to gentle in an interview with Glen Schofield, director of the brand new The Callisto Protocol.

Just lately, the Callisto Protocol was launched to…blended critiques, let’s say (our personal Ashley Bardhan appreciated how bold it was, regardless of some annoying problem spikes). Anyway, to assist drum up publicity for the brand new horror sport, director Glen Schofield has been going round doing interviews and whatnot. And two weeks in the past he did a video with Wired through which he answered random tweets about sport improvement. That’s the place he revealed a enjoyable little bit of trivia a couple of well-liked Lord of the Rings sport he labored on at EA.

In the Wired video, Schofield (who beforehand labored on Useless House and Name of Obligation) solutions a query as to why devs don’t make their very own engines anymore and as a substitute use pre-existing tech. The director explains that it’s simply too rattling costly and time-consuming to do that at present, and that it’s virtually all the time higher to take an outdated engine and repurpose it, like he did at EA.

You see, when he was a producer on 2003 licensed beat ‘em up The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, his workforce spent a 12 months engaged on a brand new engine for the sport. However issues have been going slowly and the sport had a tough deadline to hit. So he appeared round on the varied different engines EA was utilizing for its video games at the moment to search out some tech they may repurpose. And weirdly sufficient, he got here to the conclusion that the most recent Tiger Woods golf sport had the proper engine.

“Lord of the Rings is about giant areas after which form of a citadel on the tip or one thing, a fortress. What’s like that? Tiger Woods!” defined Schofield, “Lengthy areas, and on the finish is the place you go get meals, the place you’re achieved. And so we took the Tiger Woods engine and turned that right into a Lord of the Rings engine.”

Now, that is humorous and fascinating sufficient by itself. However one final half got here to gentle earlier at present on Twitter. It seems, in line with a former EA dev, that some modified Lord of the Rings visible results code was later re-used on a PSP Tiger Woods sport to create puffs of smoke throughout ball impression.

Apparently the code of the PSP Tiger Woods sport additionally incorporates references to Gandalf and different LotR characters, too. As ever, sport improvement is messy and endlessly fascinating.